The Easel

18th April 2017

Colouring Out: Queer British Art At The Tate

Fisun Güner | The Quietus | 8th April 2017

Before homosexuality was decriminalized in Britain, secrecy was a requisite part of a gay man’s life. Art about the gay experience was thus discreet, coded. This show, a welcome first for establishment Britain, mostly attracts praise but also some debate. Reflecting the topic’s history and complexities, one critic notes that “the show tears itself apart between a narrative and an aesthetic experience.” More images are here.

Kara Walker’s Next Act

Doreen St Felix | Vulture | 16th April 2017

Kara Walker’s black paper silhouettes brought renown. What made her genuinely famous was her large public sculpture in New York covered in sugar. “She … knows that putting a naked representation of a black woman in a public space invites all sorts of projections, bullshit, and reverence. She likes that. [Her artist father has asked her] when are you going to get over this race thing?”

What’s driving the growing interest in African art?

Jane Morris | The Art Newspaper | 13th April 2017

You might see this as a marketing piece but it is still an interesting overview. Upcoming exhibitions in Paris will highlight contemporary African art. In Cape Town a private museum is being built. Big collectors are nametagged. Major auction houses sense an opportunity – “This market has been largely ignored and under-represented, but now that’s being corrected.” Several better-known artists are profiled.

How Damien Hirst staged his comeback with sunken treasures in Venice

Karen Wright | The Independent | 12th April 2017

For some time Damien Hirst’s reputation has been slipping as have prices for his work. No surprise then that his huge new show is described as a “comeback”. Is the art any good? Some critics call the work a “wreck”, others are more positive. Misgivings abound. Says one:  “It takes genius to push kitsch to the point where it becomes sublime”. More images are here and a short video (3 min) here.

Death, destruction and deity: painting Guernica

Gus Van Hensbergen | The Art Newspaper | 5th April 2017

A long, but interesting, essay on the ongoing debate about Picasso’s masterpiece. “What I am sure invaded Picasso’s mental space was the much richer tradition, so celebrated in Spain, of sargas [large church tapestries]. They are traditionally hung up to celebrate feasts and special holy days …The claustrophobia and horror of Guernica is contained and made accessible because it is essentially a theatre set.”

Homesick: On Larry Sultan at LACMA

Kate Wolf | Los Angeles Review of Books | 16th February 2015

A retrospective of Californian photographer Larry Sultan opened this week.  The linked piece from an earlier show profiles work that featured his parents. This work asks “what’s become of his family’s dreams of a house, a garden, and the good life out in sunny California. Home may be the place by which everywhere else is measured, but it’s more of a tracking point or idea than a possible destination.” More images are here.

Image: SFMOMA

An Excavation Of One Of The World’s Greatest Art Collections

Oliver Roeder | fivethirtyeight.com | 6th April 2017

In February New York’s Met put images of most of its collection online – plus a descriptive data set. The “sweet scalability” of this data provides more than a summary of the collection. “One vase means little on its own … But together with its contemporaries, it means the contours of a civilization. And when juxtaposed against all vases, it helps create a first-hand account of the history of the world.”

4th April 2017

In Remembrance of James Rosenquist: 1933 – 2017

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 1st April 2017

Rosenquist started off painting billboard ads but then brought this advertising aesthetic to fine art. Kapow!- he helped launch Pop. One critic noted that, unlike Warhol, Rosenquist “rendered his blue-collar view of American things without mockery”. “He extended art into the hyperspace of culture and brought more of the culture into art; [creating] what amounted to a buzzing optically alive American Cubism”

Image: MoMA

Alphonse Mucha: In Quest of Beauty

Rosalind Ormiston | Artists and Illustrators | 20th March 2017

Mucha got lucky when asked to design the street posters for Sarah Bernhardt’s new play. His Byzantine-style designs were an instant sensation. Thus art nouveau was born. Huge commercial success didn’t change Mucha’s artistic beliefs – his Slavic heritage and Freemasons belief in human progress. He wanted to help promote products that benefitted people, such as bicycles and … cigarette papers.

Image: Mucha Foundation

Digital replicas are not soulless – they help us engage with art

Erich Hatala Matthes | Apollo Magazine | 23rd March 2017

Roman sculptures were often copies of Greek antiquities. Should we regard them, or modern digital reproductions, as no different to forgeries? “The worry that replicas will lead us to lose interest in originals is just speculation”.  Crowds wanting selfies with the Mona Lisa show that “where digital reproductions are concerned, people still care about the proximity of the replica, and themselves, to the genuine article.”

Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting

Sarah Vowles | The Idle Woman | 27th March 2017

Coming from regional Delft and with little known about his background, Vermeer somehow got the reputation as a loner. Except it seems he wasn’t. A Paris exhibition demonstrates amply his close interactions with other contemporary Dutch artists. That doesn’t mean his works were the same as theirs. To modern eyes, his sublime interiors look “hypnotic and intimate … a sense of time nearly stopped”. Multiple images are here.

At the MFA, bearing witness to the unbearable

Mark Feeney | Boston Globe | 24th March 2017

How should we regard images taken in a WW2 Jewish ghetto? Their survival is miraculous and they are a valuable historical record. Another review digs deeper. “Did [the photographer] have much of an artistic vision? Is it even fair to ask that, given the circumstances…? [If this] is art, it’s an art that gets its undeniable power through the suffering and ultimate demise of its subjects.” An excellent video (4 min) is here.

Colour is

Sam Cornish | Studio International | 20th March 2017

How does colour work in art and how important is it? These issues are explored in a London show, reviewed in the linked piece. But perhaps more intriguing is the introduction to the book that inspired the show. “[T]he problem of colour is often its unreliability, its seeming randomness and its apparent autonomy. While almost always connected to objects, colour nevertheless doesn’t seem quite to belong to these objects.”

Image: Tate

Selfies at the Saatchi Gallery: This isn’t art, it’s an advert

Hettie Judah | iNews | 31st March 2017

What exactly is the impact of social media’s selfie culture? Does it create pressures for social conformity or to have an enviable persona? Is it that selfies “create the illusion … of direct contact and intimacy”? Sadly a selfie exhibition in London, prominently sponsored by a phone maker, ignores all this. One critic muses “I think we know the corporate tail is wagging the art gallery dog.”

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